"I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day
in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near
Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974." And so begins Middlesex, the mesmerizing
saga of a near-mythic Greek American family and the "roller-coaster ride of a
single gene through time." The odd but utterly believable story of Cal
Stephanides, and how this 41-year-old hermaphrodite was raised as Calliope, is
at the tender heart of this long-awaited second novel from Jeffrey Eugenides,
whose elegant and haunting 1993 debut, The Virgin Suicides, remains one of the
finest first novels of recent memory.

Eugenides weaves together a kaleidoscopic narrative spanning 80 years of a
stained family history, from a fateful incestuous union in a small town in early
1920s Asia Minor to Prohibition-era Detroit; from the early days of Ford Motors
to the heated 1967 race riots; from the tony suburbs of Grosse Pointe and a
confusing, aching adolescent love story to modern-day Berlin. Eugenides's
command of the narrative is astonishing. He balances Cal/Callie's shifting
voices convincingly, spinning this strange and often unsettling story with
intelligence, insight, and generous amounts of humor:

Emotions, in my experience aren't covered by single words. I don't believe in
"sadness," "joy," or "regret." … I'd like to have at my disposal complicated
hybrid emotions, Germanic traincar constructions like, say, "the happiness that
attends disaster." Or: "the disappointment of sleeping with one's fantasy." ...
I'd like to have a word for "the sadness inspired by failing restaurants" as
well as for "the excitement of getting a room with a minibar." I've never had
the right words to describe my life, and now that I've entered my story, I need
them more than ever.

When you get to the end of this splendorous book, when you suddenly realize that
after hundreds of pages you have only a few more left to turn over, you'll
experience a quick pang of regret knowing that your time with Cal is coming to a
close, and you may even resist finishing it--putting it aside for an hour or
two, or maybe overnight--just so that this wondrous, magical novel might never
end. --Brad Thomas Parsons